Joseph Heller

People who don't reread Catch 22 every few years are not to be trusted. It was time, and I began last night.

Yossarian is in the hospital with his almost jaundice. The Texan was admitted to the ward.

"The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him."

Dunkirk II

The Admiralty steams to the rescue, 70 years after Dunkirk I. Hail Britannia.

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The dust is supposed to damage jet engines, and I have seen everyone from the likes of Chuck Schumer to Elton John quoted on the matter. Maybe the world's great wire services and newspapers could set up an interview with an actual aeronautical engineer. Just for a little journalistic balance, y'know.

Retro bangers

The horoscope says it's a lucky day, so I think I'll try again on the magazine fix for the Marlin Model 38.

I'm trying to adapt a tube spring and follower cannibalized from a 1907 Hopkins and Allen Military Rifle which is too far gone to ever be a shooter again. (Neat old rifle though, almost a as neat as H and A's ad for it in Popular Mechanix. In those days gun makers used Presidents' words to move product.)

It shouldn't be all that difficult once I determine how to retain the follower in the tube after the magazine is empty. You can shoot the gun all day long even without the internal tube parts if you simply raise the muzzle to about vertical after each shot.

Barack Obama and Goldman Sachs

Drum me out of the Club if you want, but I applaud the SEC for suing Hell out of Goldman Sachs.

The political forces who brought deregulation to the financial markets beginning, roughly, in the Reagan and Clinton years missed one vital step. They neglected to treat fraud -- the intellectual equivalent of gratuitous violence (Thank you, Ms. Rand.) -- as a serious crime.

(Those political forces profited beyond the dreams of greed from the bubble and the collapse, but that is another essay.)

Goldman Sachs and a hundred other big-time bankers and brokers and insurance giants were selling products neither they nor their customers understood. That was no particular sin in itself. All the CDO , CMO, Debt Swap, et al. peddlers had to do to square themselves with the law and with morality was to announce in large type: "We think these things might make you some money, just like the Bulgarian Lottery or American Powerball, but since we don't quite know what we're selling, you might want to fly to Vegas instead."

The same principle should have governed mortgage brokers -- from the guy in the Trailer Court who printed up some business card to the high rollers like Country Wide and maybe Ditech. All they needed to clear the fraud hurdle was a prominent announcement every time their spokesasses hit the teevee tube: "But really, folks, if you need guys like us, you can't afford the damn house anyway. And you really, really can't afford whatever the Hell you want to buy with the ruinous second mortgage we'll be pleased to write for you."

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The charges say G-S was blatantly venal in putting together some oddball financial products which could be hawked as investments likely to go up but which were, in fact, designed to go down so a G-S client could profit from a side bet with an insurance company.

Because the bursting of the bubble affected me -- and everyone else who counts on a a respectable interest on carefully saved money -- rather substantially, I've paid attention to the players, their shoddy products, and their criminal sales methods. It leaves the hope that the SEC suit will strip the guilty naked -- and that the the Department of Justice is preparing enough criminal charges to keep the money thugs in poverty and misery and uncertainty for the rest of their miserable, thieving lives.

I suppose a libertarian ought to note in passing that the actions against G-S did not require any or all of His Obamaness's proposed new anti-Wall Street laws, and they never will . All it takes is the will to enforce fraud laws already on the book in one form or another since, oh, about 1787 , assuming you don't care to wander backwards through he various legal codes until you get to the one HRH Hammurabi liked.